Private passions

Although the idea of a life not fully lived is central to his poetry, TS Eliot was not the dry old stick of his self-caricature. His personal story was full of quiet drama, and even recklessness, argues Craig Raine

TS Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri on September 26 1888. He died in London aged 77. By then, he was the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and, in the same year, the recipient of the Order of Merit, England's most distinguished honour. He was the most influential and authoritative literary arbiter of the 20th century and a publisher of great distinction at Faber and Faber, where he published WH Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender. As the editor of the influential magazine, the Criterion, from 1922 until 1939, he published Proust, Gide and Thomas Mann - an indication of his cultural pan-Europeanism as well as his access to the literary firmament. He was a world figure.

Late in his career, he was a surprisingly successful poetic dramatist. He was the century's most famous poet - oddly, because his prestige was founded on poetry notorious for its difficulty. On March 6 1950 he was on the cover of Time magazine. On April 30 1956, Eliot lectured to 14,000 people at the baseball stadium in Minneapolis on "The Frontiers of Criticism". In Raymond Chandler's novel The Long Goodbye (1953), when Amos, the African-American chauffeur of Mrs Loring, refuses a dollar tip, Philip Marlowe mildly twits his fastidiousness by offering to buy him the poems of TS Eliot: "He said he already had them." A hundred pages on, Marlowe and Amos have a plausible discussion - Amos is a graduate of Howard University - about "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock". (They agree "that the guy didn't know very much about women".)

Eliot's detractors often insinuate that this eminence was achieved by feline caution, literary politicking, calculation, a shrewd assessment of the literary marketplace, a quiet but inexorable campaign of ruthless self-advancement. I think it is a matter of literary merit rather than manipulation of opinion. In fact, Imagination of the Heart, Theresa Whistler's biography of Walter de la Mare, demonstrates that 1922, the agreed date for the conclusive advent of modernism - with the publication of Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's The Waste Land, and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium - seemed much less conclusive to de la Mare, JC Squire and other tenacious neo-Georgians, "also-rans" who had their own platforms including the London Mercury and the Weekly Westminster, to which the young Graham Greene contributed. It wasn't a question of capturing the sole radio station. The strategic battles were still being "fought" in the 1950s. Walter de la Mare thought the selection of Eliot as the only 20th-century English poet at the Festival of Britain in 1953 was invidious - and wrote to Eliot asking him to withdraw.

Despite this latter-day celebrity, for much of his life, Eliot's fame was restricted to literature. He was a private person. In his newspaper column, Gilbert Harding, a once-famous, now forgotten British broadcasting celebrity, recounted his embarrassment at being pointed out on the London underground while Eliot, "the greatest poet of the century", was ignored, unrecognised in the corner of the same compartment.

Eliot's life, like the lives of many writers who spend their time at their desks, was apparently uneventful compared to, say, Ernest Hemingway's blood-boltered, flashbulb tormented exploits. In "To Criticise the Critic" (1961), he described himself as "the mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter". And the idea of a life not fully lived is the central, animating idea of Eliot's poetry.

However, Eliot's own life is full of quiet drama, even of recklessness.

There is the assiduous man of letters, indefatigably reviewing, editing and giving lectures; and then there is the poet who renounced a promising career as a philosopher in American academe for an uncertain literary life in a foreign country, the poet who married, within weeks of meeting her, Vivien Haigh-Wood. Though initially Vivien was a valued, even essential literary confrere and a loved wife - "I have felt happier, these few days, than ever in my life", Eliot writes to Bertrand Russell on January 14 1916 - the marriage was not a success. On January 10 1916, Eliot writes to Conrad Aiken that financial worries and concern over Vivien's poor health had stopped him writing: yet "I am having a wonderful time nevertheless. I have lived through material for a score of long poems in the last six months. An entirely different life from that I looked forward to two years ago. Cambridge [Mass.] seems to me a dull nightmare now ..." Vivien committed adultery with Bertrand Russell, Eliot's ex-teacher and mentor. Eliot was legally separated from her in 1933. Gradually, she went mad and in 1938 was committed by her brother Maurice. She died in a private mental hospital in Finsbury Park, London, on January 23 1947.

In June 1927 Eliot was received into the Church of England, and in November became a naturalised British citizen. Virginia Woolf writes of Eliot "in his four-piece suit" - repressed, reserved, buttoned-up. If we concentrate too much on the Lloyds banker in his pin-striped trousers, the London publisher with his bowler hat and rolled umbrella, and Eliot's own ironic self-portrait as the circumspect pedant - "Restricted to What Precisely / And If and Perhaps and But" - we are likely to overlook the man whose religious conversion first announced itself in the Vatican when Eliot fell to his knees in front of Michelangelo's Pietà to the amazement of his brother Henry Ware Eliot. Eliot isn't the dry old stick of his self-caricature. This is Robert Lowell describing Eliot dancing with Valerie, his new bride and second wife, 40 years younger than himself, and married in secret at the age of 69: "they danced so dashingly at the Charles River boatclub brawl that he was called 'Elbows Eliot'."

Given that the main events of Eliot's life are so sensational, even lurid, it may seem odd that the central focus of his oeuvre should concentrate on the life not fully lived, "buried", avoided, side-stepped. It is conceivable, though, that these dramatic decisions in Eliot's life were provoked by the fear of not living fully - of opting for insurance rather than risk. The theme itself comes from literature, not "life" - from Henry James in the first instance, but fed by the main current of 19th-century literature. It is important to realise that, for writers, the fully lived life also means the interior life, the mental life. Grey matter acting on rereading matter is a matter of passion, too.

This contradiction - between the risks Eliot took in his own life and his dominant theme of debilitating caution - makes it difficult to equate biographical events with the poetry. Unlike Sylvia Plath - whose poetry cannot be understood without the prior knowledge that her marriage to Ted Hughes failed and that she was a suicide risk - Eliot's poetry is committed to impersonality. The life hardly helps us at all as readers. In "The Frontiers of Criticism" (1961), Eliot lays out this position:

For myself, I can only say that a knowledge of the springs that released a poem is not necessarily a help towards understanding the poem: too much information about the origins of the poem may even break my contact with it. I feel no need for any light upon [Wordsworth's] Lucy poems beyond the radiance shed by the poems themselves.

It is possible to see this as evasive. Many recent commentators have done so. They prefer a guilty poet trying to deny responsibility for a mad wife; a bisexual philanderer; an ambitious, reptilian anti-Semite who was prepared to pimp his wife to other men in order to advance his literary career. There is no evidence that Eliot was either a fornicator or a homosexual. These are the flimsy insinuations of the unscrupulous and unscholarly biographer. Eliot never repudiated his first wife. Until she was committed by her brother, Eliot made sure she was watched over by mutual friends. He could not live with her, however. In the light of her extraordinary behaviour, his decision is reasonable - route marches through London in full fascist uniform looking for him, well-and-widely-attested paranoia, pushing chocolate through the Faber letterbox. The idea that Eliot pimped Vivien to Russell is pure malicious supposition. If anything, the evidence suggests that Eliot, like many other cuckolds, found out much later.

The usual links between the life and the art are problematic in Eliot's case because he held a theory about the impersonality of great art - outlined in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919). Essentially, the author of Ash-Wednesday ("Because I do not hope ...") can hardly have meant to rule out the personal. Eliot's "impersonality" addresses and describes the artistic process, the artistic treatment of the personal.

Eliot's essay was classicist, an aesthetic whose thrust was essentially negative, defined in opposition to romanticism. The romantic position values strong emotions, makes them central to the achievement of art. It was a mistake Eliot was determined to overturn: in art, he wrote, "it is not the 'greatness', the intensity of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts". Instead, he argued for the impersonality of great art. By "impersonality" Eliot meant subjectivity, impartiality, disinterestedness, distance - the control of accidentals, of subjectivity, of mere contingencies. Hence the idea of the objective correlative and its implied contract between writer and reader - that the impenetrably private is inadmissable as art.

But this does not mean, could not mean, that art should be purged of anything personal - as many have wrongly believed. On the contrary, Eliot maintains the emotions are what we make art from. The emotions are "the components", but they have to be made into something. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is though, a denunciation of unreconstructed subjectivity in art. Strong feelings cannot make you a poet. Otherwise, every sentimental drunk, every football fan, every religious bigot would qualify. Creativity means creating something.

Nevertheless, aesthetic distance means that it is dangerous and difficult to translate the poetry, to "money-change" the poetry, back into personal experience. For instance, I was once asked on a television film if Eliot was Prufrock in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". I explained that Eliot was cultured, whereas Prufrock was intimidated by the idea of talking about Michelangelo; that Eliot came from good family and was unlikely to be thrown socially by the presence of a footman. I argued that, whereas Eliot was the palpably passionate author of the line "blood shaking my heart / The awful daring of a moment's surrender", the character Prufrock was as "uptight as a rolled umbrella" - a sound-bite followed in the film by a photograph of Eliot outside the doors of Faber and Gwyer, leaning on a rolled umbrella. Rhetorical editing of perverse genius that was 1,000 miles from my intention - or the truth about Eliot, who married Vivien without first telling his parents.

There aren't any easy equations. Gerontion is a character in a dramatic monologue, not a transparent disguise for the poet.

In the end, we are left with the poetry. It speaks to any attentive reader. An accountant I know read The Waste Land and picked out two words from the passage in which the neurotic woman brushes her hair: "her hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words, then would be savagely still". The unusual, counterintuitive combination of savagery and stillness impressed him. He was right to be impressed, to feel a frisson of repressed rage in the tense paradox. It is for these verbal gifts that we read Eliot's poetry. This is the light, the radiance cast by the poetry itself.

· T S Eliot by Craig Raine is published on January 15 by OUP, price £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 click here